The Temple and the Birds

Cristoff Marron rose before dawn to the now-familiar sound of songbirds harmonizing in the trees about his timber and tin hut.  Feeling lithe and carefree, he sprang up from his bamboo mat, stretching his arms high and wide, feeling his body’s hardness and suppleness.  This physique was a recent and delightful development: a steady diet of rice and tropical fruits had profoundly transformed his body. 

In Paris he had lived a miserable, sedentary sort of life which at the time he had found quite satisfactory in its predictable dullness.  Every morning he had woken up and wandered out the door of his dusty apartment, down two short flights of stairs, and out into the faceless bustle of the morning.  He would smoke two cigarettes en route to his favorite café, wherein he would spend the morning eating pastries and reading the news, or a novel.  Then for lunch he would walk a few blocks to the old Chinese restaurant on the corner where his friend Maurice would be waiting with a smile: Maurice, a man of enviable precision in manner, dress, and punctuality; Maurice, with whom he would discuss art, politics, and women; Maurice the Buddhist, who had suggested that Cristoff should get away from the stifling atmosphere of Montmartre and take a tour of Thailand, and especially of its serene jungle monasteries; bravo, Maurice!  Cristoff beamed in gratitude, as though Maurice were there with him, hovering above him, incarnate as the Buddha himself.  He chanted the Heart Sutra mantra and then fell into a deep wakeful bliss.  Not the tickle on his nose that turned into an itch, not even the scoliosis that stiffened his lower back, could diminish the joy of stillness and concentration upon the breath.

The birdsong rose to a crescendo, anticipating the return of the sun, the master of all life; Cristoff’s contentment crested in similar fashion.  He stood again, dressed, and danced around a little, brimming, overflowing with life.  Shortly he composed himself, recalling the quiet dignity, the grace, the economy of movement which he so admired in his host monks.  Again he returned his focus to his breathing, calmly opening the front door of the hut and walking outside. 

Morning mist clung to the ground.  The path that led from his hut to the temple was wet and giving beneath his sandaled feet.  The sun’s first pale rays gave the trees a gold-white sheen.  There was a slight chill which made Cristoff pull his orange ankle-length robe more tightly about him; he touched his cleanly-shaven head, for a second wishing his curly brown locks were still flowing down to his shoulders.  With a smile he waved off this idea: in only a matter of minutes the sun would warm the jungle comfortably; by noon it would be sweltering.

Up a hill and around a bend was the temple of intricately-carved wood and gold stupas, with all of its baroque appendages and Oriental luster.  The monks would be sitting in deep meditation now; breakfast would be served in a short while, then maintenance duties (what a blessing and a virtue, manual labor!) would commence, and then a teaching and Dhamma discussion would be held in the main hall, in which Cristoff would try in his halting Thai to participate.  The monks always smiled encouragingly, and laughed when he tried to slip in a little joke.

Cristoff emerged onto the temple grounds.  Everything appeared in order: the garden was neatly trimmed as always; the old white pickup truck which belonged to Rusty, the American (and only foreigner besides Cristoff), was parked by the wooden gate to the far left.  The gate was symbolic only, as there was no fence.  Behind it was a muddy road that rambled for a long time through the hilly terrain before connecting with a broader avenue of stone that led to the nearest city.

He walked up the front steps of the temple and into the anteroom, where tapestries of dragons and Bodhisattvas hung in quiet splendor.  Then passing through the double-sickle arch of the entrance he stepped into the main hall.  It was empty: rows of meditation cushions were laid out at the foot of the slightly-elevated platform where the ajahn would teach and lead the day’s activities.  A plump, golden Buddha statue with a broad smile sat contentedly behind the ajahn’s cushion, surrounded by flowers and incenses.

In his three months (had it only been three months?) at the monastery, Cristoff had never found the main hall empty at this hour.  The sun was already peaking in through the open windows, from which the dew of the night was beginning to evaporate.  Were all the monks in retreat in their chambers?  Why had he not been informed?  Surely they had not headed into the city: Rusty’s truck was the only transportation kept readily available.

What might have been a sudden pervasive alarm in Cristoff’s old life of thinly-veiled anxiety and constant physical tension now registered as mere perplexity.  He went to sit on a cushion near the front of the room.  The exotic elegance of the empty hall was immense, its spaciousness palpable.  At first he had no difficulty entering the meditative state; but after several minutes the itch on his nose became a distraction, and his subsequent thoughts about the itch became a real nuisance; and he wondered why on earth the hall was still empty, and where all the monks might have gone without him.  He stood and bowed to the golden Buddha, and walked back through the anteroom and out the front door.

At odds with the crispness of the morning and the warmth of the rising sun was a dark grey horizon looming above the tree-line.  The birds had all gone quiet, and none were pecking around in the garden as they usually did.  A deep feeling of dismay came over Cristoff like black ink clouding clear water.  Never once since leaving France, since the giddiness of boarding the flight to New Delhi, whence he would eventually disembark for Bangkok, had he felt such negativity.  A flood of shame and anger washed over him; he felt irrationally as though this whole trip he had been cheating his way into happiness.  He felt painfully the urge to return to the warm, dusty cocoon of his life in Paris.  Surely this was some kind of test!  It could not, however, be a cruel trick devised by the monks, no—never the bhikkus, with their inexhaustible mirth and humility!

Mystified, he walked aimlessly through the well-tended grounds, until at length he decided upon walking around to the back of the temple.  There he found no one: no sign of the monks walking across the roofed bridge from their chambers to the main temple; no clotheslines adorned with billowing orange robes; only the same damnable sense of spaciousness that pervaded this little clearing in the jungle.  He considered shouting in Thai, or in English to Rusty, or simply cursing loudly in his native French, but could not bring himself to break the silence that enveloped the temple grounds.  He walked forlornly toward the path to his hut: he would change into more durable Western clothes, fill his sack with the bottled water he had brought with him, and then head back to the temple’s kitchen to prepare some food and assess the situation more completely.

As he walked around the bend in the path lightning streaked through the quiet sky, and thunder responded quickly, erupting over the forest like a bellowing demon.  Clouds rushed to blanket the forest, but mercifully sucked in their heaving gut of rain for the time being.  Cristoff quickened his pace to a near-jog, but froze when he reached the dip of the hilltop’s edge.

A pair of purple-black eyes wheeled and glared at him from down the path, near the base of the hill some eighty meters down.  They belonged to an impossible visage: a mottled green, scaly head with a long, powerful snout and a plume of green and purple feathers beginning at the forehead and cascading back over a muscular neck.  The creature whose attention Cristoff had caught stood erect on two avian haunches, its V-shaped arms bobbing slowly at its sides.  It had been crossing the path, about to reenter the forest; now it turned its whole sleek torso squarely toward Cristoff with a swift, menacing hop.  It must have stood nearly three meters tall.

Cristoff met the creature’s cold, appraising gaze—could not but meet it—and an eternity passed.  Cristoff became aware of the beating of his heart.  It was beating so loudly and rapidly that it might be heard all the way in Paris, he thought.

Paris.  The hollow word floated from Cristoff’s mind into the ether between him and the monster. 

The creature cocked its head ever so slightly to the side, then lowered its neck and bent its knees.  Cristoff ran—he flew.  His sandals were ill-fitted and burned the pads of his feet.  The thud-and-click of the measured sprint of clawed feet over mud followed him.  Rusty’s old pickup truck was within sight; he would make it!  His robe slid and caught under his sandal; he stumbled, but recovered and ripped it off of his body from the bare shoulder down with a violence he did not know he possessed.  Naked except for his underwear and sandals, he reached the truck and threw himself at the door, pulling the handle.  It was unlocked!  Mother of mercy, unlocked!

The rain began to pour.  He was inside the car now; he looked out the driver’s side window and saw a blur of green flying toward him.  It slammed into the door with such force that the window shattered all over him.  The creature fell backwards.  A gargling, rolling wail went up from its throat.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the glint of metal; he spun and saw Rusty’s keys on the front passenger’s seat, casually nestled between a pair of hiking boots and a meditation guidebook.  He snatched them and jammed them one-by-one into the ignition; the third key clicked in.  His hands were red like lobster claws and convulsed violently as he started the truck. 

Against his every instinct he ventured a glance out the open window.  The creature writhed on the ground as rain pummeled its glossy hide and mixed with the crimson blood gushing from a gash over its eye.  It wailed nightmarishly, extending reptilian hands with black razor talons to its face to staunch the bleeding.  Cristoff hit the accelerator and the truck slammed through the wooden gate, sliding as the four-wheel drive spun across the fresh quicksand mud of the storm. 

The truck flew forward; every muscle in his right leg was clenched, his foot pressed against the accelerator with such force that it might snap the plastic apparatus.  Rain whipped into the car from the shattered window and fell in white sheets upon the windshield.  His trembling left hand fiddled with the dashboard equipment but could not find the windshield wiper.  He bent forward and squinted, trying to discern the pale brown sliver of the dirt road from the greedy green mass of the forest which devoured it at every turn.  It was hopeless.  He leaned his head out the window for a better view; droplets of rain flew into his eyes, blinding him.  He swerved, and then the truck was careening, bouncing violently downhill.  It flipped.  Cristoff’s body flew limply to the roof of the cab.  The truck flipped again.  He was tossed painfully back down.  His lower spine collided with the gear stick.  His head smacked against the dashboard console, shattering the thin glass panel of the tape-deck clock.  Then he was unconscious.

When Cristoff Marron awoke again, he was in a hazy bog of blood and death.  The rain had moved on, leaving a brown-green mist behind it.  The maggot-eaten corpses of strange lizards were scattered about him.  The sickly sweet smell of his fresh wounds mingled with the noxious vapors of the corpses.  He was in a swampy ravine where spiny, alien plants sprouted from the decay.  The truck was nowhere to be seen.

By a surge of adrenaline he was able to stagger to his feet, but he fell in a seizure of shooting pain after a few steps: his right leg was broken.  His mind failed him; he could feel the erratic electrical firing of pulpy nerves in his cranium; fragments of obscure proverbs and monkey-babble filled his ears.  He clutched the loose, soggy earth like he might clutch his bed-sheets when he woke up with a wine headache.  It slipped through his fingers.

He wanted to find rock.  He wanted to write his name somewhere permanent.  He wanted to spark a fire that would turn the jungle into ash and blaze on for eons.  Crawling pitifully on his stomach he made his way toward the edge of the ravine.  There was an ovular indentation in the ground: a nest of grass and pungent moss, littered with cracked yellow eggshells.  Little two-legged lizards with shallow purplish eyes rolled about, scratching each other with tiny claws and chewing on the moss.

Furiously he grabbed the nearest one.  It squealed as he smashed its soft body with his thumb and fingernails.  He twisted its neck and threw it disgustedly at the rest of the awful brood.  He spat at them, tears running hot down his blood-caked cheeks.  He tried to move again, but a great wrinkly, three-pronged foot came down upon his bare back, its curved claws embedding themselves deeply in his clammy flesh.

With his last strength he did not turn to face the beast which had triumphed over him, for he knew its callous face, knew the fresh gash on its brow, and knew at last what it represented.  Its hot breath blew steadily upon the nape of his neck, smelling like grape jam and liver.  With his last strength he lifted his right hand and with his index finger wrote in the slime,                       

Je sens le temps

Jaws wrapped firmly around his scalp and twisted sharply.  So it was that Cristoff Marron, the twenty-seven year old Parisian who had been gaining a sterling reputation as a poet before his unexpected departure for a remote monastery, died in the primordial muck and gore of an ancient world.